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chromium: updated to 44.0.2403.107. This is a bugfix release which should solve issues for sites that do not properly support https redirection. chromium-widevine-plugin: updated to 44.0.2403.107. Package contains the Widevine Content Decryption Module (CDM) 1.4.8.823, extracted from official Chrome binaries (this package needs chromium of the same version).

chromium: updated to 44.0.2403.89. Note: only the 64-bit package has NaCl (Native Client) support due to the absense of a 32-bit toolchain needed to build NaCl. chromium-widevine-plugin: updated to 44.0.2403.89. Package contains the Widevine Content Decryption Module (CDM) 1.4.8.823, extracted from official Chrome binaries (this package needs chromium of the same version).

This is KDE 5_15.07 for Slackware, consisting of the KDE Frameworks 5.12.0, Plasma 5.3.2 and Applications 15.04.3. Compared to my KDE 5_15.06 no further changes were made apart from the updates to Frameworks, Plasma and Applications. Note: This is meant only to be installed on top of Slackware -current and it will *replace* any version […]

14.1/4.14.3/deps/qt: removed my qt-4.8.6 package (containing some KDE related patches) because now Slackware 14.1 has qt-4.8.7 with those same patches in its official repository. I encourage you to upgrade to that version.

13.37/slackware64-compat32: Refreshed the *compat32 packages. 14.0/slackware64-compat32: Refreshed the *compat32 packages. 14.1/compat32-tools-3.5-noarch-5alien.tgz: In massconvert32.sh, handle the move of cups from a/ to ap/ gracefully if this compat32-tools package is installed on Slackware

This means that I have said goodbye to the single configuration file (/etc/default/chromium) and switched to a configuration directory, which is “/etc/chromium/” for the chromium package. Each package (Chromium as well as any plugin or extension) can add its own configuration file to that directory. The new packages for chromium, chromium-pepperflash-plugin and chromium-widevine-plugin are now using this new setup.

I made one other change: I have applied a patch taken from an Ubuntu PPA. That patch is based on a blog post which explains how to enable VAAPI (aka hardware video decoding) on Linux. The chromium sources disable this functionality by default if you are not compiling for ChromeOS. Tell me your experiences with playback of H.264 video!

The new chromium packages have the version number 43.0.2357.65. The first release of the “43” series brings a total of 37 published security fixes, and here are the CVE’s:

[$16337][474029] High CVE-2015-1252: Sandbox escape in Chrome. Credit to anonymous.

[$7500][464552] High CVE-2015-1253: Cross-origin bypass in DOM. Credit to anonymous.

I am enjoying a long weekend at home – Ascension day is a national holiday and both my employer (IBM) and my customer (ASML) closed their offices on the friday following it.

So I decided to experiment a bit with the bread I bake. The usual routine is that I bake three breads (two sourdough and one with commercial yeast) to get us through the week without having to rely on factory bread from the supermarket. This weekend, I wanted to have a go at Kaiser rolls, also known in Austria as Kaisersemmel or Handsemmel. A piece of traditional artisanal baking skill in Austria, but here you only get the factory made stuff.

I wanted to hand-make these traditional rolls according to the old ways. Traditionally, the leaven (natural yeast) would be provided to the baker by the local brewery, but that is not a viable solution nowadays. But we have sourdough, which should have some semblance to the old sour mash from the brewery.

So I set out to compare recipes and shaping techniques. There’s lots of recipes to be found actually, and the conclusion with all these white bun recipes is – you just add what you like. In my case, I wanted to go easy on the butter and sugar so that my wife would not have any reservations in sampling the finished product. But afterwards she admitted she would have eaten them whatever the content, they were that tasty.

Here is the recipe I ended up with. It was enough to create 11 rolls of roughly 75g each.

The evening preceding the day you want to eat the rolls, you mix the following ingredients into a rough mass:

Leave the rough dough to rest for 25 minutes (the flour is allowed to absorb the moisture, this is called “autolyse”) and then add:

20g butter (soft, hand-warm)

7g salt

Knead the dough by hand during 6 minutes until it is silky smooth. Then return the dough ball to a container and cover with clingfilm.
Leave the container on the kitchen counter for a bulk fermentation during the night. Do not place the container in the fridge. In 8 hours, the dough will double or almost triple in size.

Next morning, dump the dough onto your work area and gently push the air out with your flattened hands.
Using a dough cutter divide the mass into pieces of 75 – 80 grams and shape them into balls, creating surface tension. Leave these to rest for 15 minutes.
Gently flatten the balls of dough, creating circular disks. Dip them into some rye flour so that they are coated with a thin layer. This will prevent them sticking together. Leave to rest for another 15 minutes.

Now, shape the Kaiser rolls. There are several techniques for doing this, but I used what I assume is the traditional way. Here is a nice video of shaping a Kaiser roll. No rubber stamp, no knots in the dough. The real stuff!
Place the shaped rolls face-down on an oven tray which has been dusted with rye flour. This is needed so that the folds do not disappear while the dough is proofing. Cover them with a linen cloth or clingfilm. Leave them there for a second proofing, until doubled in size (will take something like 2 hours).
Heat up your oven in time, set the temperature to 200C. Place a low metal baking tray on the oven floor.
Bake the rolls for 20-25 minutes. Introduce steam during the first 10 minutes by pouring a cup of cold water into the tray on the oven floor and quickly closing the oven door, and vent the oven after 10 minutes.
They are ready when the edges are golden brown. When you tap the bottom of a roll with your fingers it should give a “hollow” sound. Leave them to cool for a bit before you cut into them. If you started early in the morning, the rolls will be ready for lunch.

This is how mine came out of the oven:

There’s no doubt to it: these sourdough rolls are the best I ever tasted. They have a nice crispy crust and the folds opened up nicely while baking.

You’ll also note that there is one roll that does not look like a Kaiser roll. I also tried my luck at a braiding a knot and that was easier than shaping a Kaiser roll. I need to practice the shaping process. It was a lot of fun, but 9 rolls does not give you a lot of experience. Definitely something I will do again shortly!

I have been working on some changes for the chromium package, and what’s better than to first test those changes on a Chromium Development release?

I have not really been happy with the choice I made to have a single configuration file (/etc/default/chromium) which would then have to be re-written by any plugins that you would install. For instance, the PepperFlash plugin modifies that file so that Chromium learns of the pathname and version of that plugin when it starts. Unfortunately, some people would accidentally wipe those modifications with every update to the Chromium main package (the “/etc/default/chromium.new” file would overwrite the “/etc/default/chromium” file if you were not paying attention).

So what I did was change the single configuration file into a configuration directory, which is “/etc/chromium-dev/” for the Chromium Dev package. Each package (Chromium as well as any plugin or extension) can add its own configuration file to that directory. As an example of how that works, I have created packages for chromium-dev, chromium-dev-pepperflash-plugin and chromium-dev-widevine-plugin that use this new setup. Those are Slackware packages for -current only by the way – when a new version of Chromium Stable is released I will also add this new configuration setup and then the packages will be released for Slackware 14.1 as well.

What else is there to say about my chromium-dev packages? Chromium-dev is the development release of the browser (there’s also a “beta” channel but I don’t care about that too much). Testing the development release from time to time is preparing me well in advance for major (or subtle) changes in the compilation process and functionality, so that when the stable channel jumps to a higher major release it won’t take me long to come up with a set of packages.

The new chromium-dev packages have the version number 44.0.2398.0. So what changed with this new major release 44 compared to the previous 43 (or even the stable 42)? One important change is that it is no longer necessary to extract the Widevine CDM library from an official Google Chrome RPM in order to compile the Open Source Widevine adapter library which is the piece of code that interfaces between the browser and the closed-source Content Decryption Module. Therefore even the Open Source purists should be at peace now with the new process. If you do want to use Widevine CDM, for instance when you want to stream Netflix in your Chromium browser, you simply install my widevine-plugin package (the version it reports will be 1.4.8.823). The browser itself will not be tainted.

The PepperFlash plugin package which I added as well (first time for my Chromium Dev releases) has a change as well, compared to the package for Chromium Stable. The PepperFlash directory is installed to “/usr/lib64/chromium-dev/” instead of “/usr/lib64/” (it’s “lib” for 32bit Slackware of course) so that the pepperflash-plugin package’s files will not clash with the pepperflash-plugin for Chromium Stable. The plugin for Chromium Dev reports itself as version 18.0.0.114 by the way. This version is not even listed yet on Adobe’s Flash test page. I assume that this too, is a development version.

I could not ignore that, so I prepared Slackware packages for you to address this new bulletin. As usual, the packages offer a Flash plugin for the chromium browser (PPAPI) and mozilla-compatible browsers (NPAPI).

If you have pipelight installed, you should run “pipelight-plugin –update” as root to get the latest MS Windows-based Flash installed automatically the next time the browser loads the pipelight plugin (at the time of writing, there is no pipelight update available but that should change in the coming days).

She was named “Witje”, Whitey, at birth because her fur was pure white. During her final year, the color went slowly out of her black face-mask. She survived a mysterious illness of which her sister died almost two years ago. She remained fragile after that ordeal. But very cute and adorable still.

She would sleep in my lap in the evening when I was working on your packages, she would eat her morning food on the kitchen counter next to me while I would be preparing my work lunch; she has wanted to be near us all the time. She was a “people” cat until the end. She loved us and we loved her back.

Last week she stopped eating, and three days ago she would no longer drink. She was a strong girl, that she managed to hold on to life for so long. She slowly faded from consciousness to deep sleep until she would no longer respond to our voices and we knew the end was not far off. But while she was awake and still able to walk she wanted to stay with us, never tried to find a quiet spot and wait for the end like her sister.

We let her sleep inbetween us during her final two nights, and now she’s gone and leaves an empty space in this household.